Words Aileen Asistio Clemente
Dear All:
PLEASE pass this mail on to everybody you know. It is the request of a special little girl who will soon leave
this world as she has cancer. Thank you for your effort; this isn't a chain letter, but a choice for all of us to
save a little girl that's dying of a serious and fatal form of cancer.
Please send this to everyone you know... or don't know. This little girl has six months left to live, and as her
dying wish, she wanted to send a letter telling everyone to live his or her life to the fullest, since she never will.
She'll never make it to the prom, graduate from high school, or get married and have a family of her own.
By you sending this to as many people as possible, you can give her and her family a little hope, because with every
name that this is sent to, The American Cancer Society will donate 3 cents per name to her treatment and recovery
plan. One guy sent this to 500 people!!!! So I know that we can send it to at least 5 or 6. Just think it could be you one
day. It's not even your money, just your time!!!
"PLEASE PASS ON AS A LAST REQUEST"
As heartbreaking as it is, this email or variations of it has been circulating in cyberspace, making people sob,
and making them forward it to all the people in their address books. However, this message and many others, has
been proven to be nothing but fraud by people who bothered to verify its source and veracity. As the Internet organization
SETI League, Inc. says, it seems that a new kind of virus is widely circulating in cyberspace. It is however something that
does not infect the computers, but instead, the millions of computer users. They called it the "Gullibility Virus." This new
virus causes people "to believe without question every groundless story, legend, and dire warning that shows up in their
inbox or browser."
How to recognize a hoax
When it says send this to everyone you know (or even those you don't). Most real documents would have a specific target.
No message could really be for "everyone" in the planet. This alone should be enough to raise the red flag.
When it uses a very technical-sounding language. Some people think when a message is filled with technical jargons,
it must be true. I say, if something is too technically vague to understand, it probably doesn't mean anything. For example,
the Good Times hoax that has been circulating since 1994 says that, "...if the program is not stopped, the computer's
processor will be placed in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop which can severely damage the processor..." Ask any
programmer and he'd tell you that there's no such thing as an "nth-complexity infinite binary loop," so there's no chance that
it could do damage to your processor.
When it tries to establish credibility by association. A variation of the email message at the beginning of this article
was supposedly signed at the end by a certain Dr. Dennis Shields. Supposedly, he was a professor and cancer researcher at
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York. After the message had circulated for some time, the
Yeshiva University posted a message acknowledging that indeed, Dr. Shields was their employee. However, they denied ever
sending, or even authorizing this email, and called it a hoax.
The cost of hoaxes
You may think that hoaxes are like practical jokes--annoying but won't really cost you anything. Well, if we are talking one
machine, that may be right. However, if we consider everyone that receives a hoax, the cost gets multiplied into some
considerable costs.
Undoubtedly, the biggest power of hoaxes is their ability to travel and multiply in record time. Most people would send these
kinds of messages to everyone in their contact list, or at least to their personal friends. Assuming that one sends it to ten
people, each of those then sends it to another ten, and so on. It is pretty much like what we call networking or multi-level
marketing. You can imagine that after some time, there are going to be millions of email messages being processed by mail
servers all over the world. Users have to pay for the cost of this because if not, the servers could slow down, or worse even
crash. And we are only talking about ten people for each person.
I've been hoaxed...now what do I do?
Of course, we can't blame you if you believed a hoax message at one time or another. These things are almost always well
thought of and well written. If you have received a message, which you suspect may be a hoax, the very first thing to do is
verify its source. You may also check if this particular message has already been declared a hoax by some Internet
organizations. There are many sites out there that list out the hoaxes circulating around the Web. One example is a
certain Rob Rosenberger's Site (http://www.vmyth.com). Most of all, if you have doubts about the message you have
received, never send it out. There's nothing worse than being pointed as the source of a forwarded hoax message.
